PAD 272 - Dahlia 2

[Mike Farley]

Day 271 and an experiment with focus stacking using Photoshop CC. Adobe's software is extremely slow for this kind of work and despite being just three images combined, required around eight hours processing. I had previously tried processing this image, but had always run out of time before it completed, hence the delay in posting.

Canon EOS 7D
Voigtländer APO-Lanthar SL II 90mm f/3.5
8 secs
f/8
ISO 100
Tripod
Cable release
(Three exposures in total)

[davidc]

EIGHT hours? What spec is your computer?

I tried merging a panorama of over 180 images into that 1.3GP London panorama and it took far less than that. Maybe I'll try this myself to see how long it takes.

[Mike Farley]

EIGHT hours? What spec is your computer?

Abacus, presumably.

It's a couple of years old, Intel 2500K CPU (unclocked) and 8 GB RAM. Not quite as quick as the most up to date, but no slouch either.

This is the relevant system info from Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop Version: 14.1.1 (14.1.1 20130910.r.414 2013/09/10:23:00:00) x64
Operating System: Windows 7 64-bit
Version: 6.1 Service Pack 1
System architecture: Intel CPU Family:6, Model:10, Stepping:7 with MMX, SSE Integer, SSE FP, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2
Physical processor count: 4
Processor speed: 3292 MHz
Built-in memory: 8160 MB
Free memory: 4737 MB
Memory available to Photoshop: 7184 MB
Memory used by Photoshop: 49 %

I tried merging a panorama of over 180 images into that 1.3GP London panorama and it took far less than that. Maybe I'll try this myself to see how long it takes.

I have just tried another three image merge and that ran much more quickly, somewhere in the region of 30 - 45 minutes. Strange, but that other one did have more definite edges, which might make it easier for the application to match things up.

[davidc]

Your Machine is perfectly fine so can't see why eight hours would be needed? Maybe stick more RAM in there, I went from 4 to 20 and the impact on Ps and Lr was profound.

[Mike Farley]

Your Machine is perfectly fine so can't see why eight hours would be needed? Maybe stick more RAM in there, I went from 4 to 20 and the impact on Ps and Lr was profound.

I have been wondering whether it is a RAM issue and I am planning to go up to 16 GB at some stage, as there is no doubt that full fat Photoshop is a memory hog. I'll need to check, but I think that 16 GB might be the maximum my motherboard supports. The main issue is not the RAM, but the 64 GB SSD from which I boot and which, at the time, I thought would be adequate. The trouble is that all sorts of junk accumulates on it and it barely has sufficient spare capacity to support 16 GBs worth of virtual paging, so I will need to update that first, then hope that I can persuade Microsoft to reactivate my copy of Office 2007. Otherwise I'll need to get Office 365 as well. If I decide that 16 GB is still not enough and I need more, then on top of that I could well need a new motherboard and processor to go with it.

This could well end up being a historically expensive RAM upgrade.